While the coverage of scholarly communications in recent months has focused more and more on the breaking news around Read & Publish and Plan S, there are another key set of developments taking place in parallel. Green open access, and in particular the role of institutional repositories in serving up preprints and other journal article artifacts, is going through some substantial transitions as well. Yesterday, news broke that DuraSpace and Lyrasis are merging. An important development for institutional repositories and related library systems, this is also yet another example of organizational consolidation among membership organizations in the library community in particular.

“Last week, approximately 180 leaders from scholarly societies, libraries, publishers, and other organizations came together at ITHAKA’s Next Wave conference in New York City. The day’s sessions featured an array of different formats and experts, focusing mostly on fundamental changes facing higher education in the United States, the result of underlying demographics, financial pressures, narrowing political support, and tension around how to define student success. The program also included a number of sessions focused on scholarly publishing and academic libraries. The opening session was an interview, conducted by ITHAKA president Kevin Guthrie of Elsevier’s chairman Youngsuk (“YS”) Chi, with some additional questions from the audience. The interview generated discussion and perspective not only about Elsevier itself, but also about broader changes in scholarly communication and approaches to organizational leadership. I have attempted to reconstruct the interview here from my notes, and Chi and Guthrie have each had a chance to edit and expand their remarks here for the record.”

“Today, in looking at the scholarly publishing sector, equity markets are focused on the European national-level consortial negotiations. If analysts are not surprised at the strong rhetoric about cancelling Big Deal packages that has emerged from the university sectors, they are troubled to see entire nations actually canceling their licenses. They have watched publishing revenue from a major country like Germany disappear all at once from one major publisher’s income statement. And they want to know whether this “contagion” will spread to North America. My view is that, while the germs are circulating, at least in the near term, publishers are unlikely to face a global pandemic.”

“When librarians prepare for a negotiation, they now routinely reach for the muscle.

At least that’s how I read the news about the Swedish library consortium and its dealings with Elsevier. If you have been too preoccupied with the Royal Wedding to pay attention to news coming out of the world of STM publishing, you can get a good backgrounder here. Briefly, the Swedish consortium attempted to dictate terms to Elsevier, terms that Elsevier would not accept. The result is that Elsevier’s contract will be cancelled, meaning that there will be no authorized access to Elsevier content for the consortium users.”

“The first version of this list was created back in the summer of 2012, at a time when publishers were being challenged repeatedly to prove they added value beyond managing peer review and some basic copy editing and formatting….This update is a reframing and expansion of the list. I’ve changed the motif from the cost perspective (expense, level of difficulty, and duration) to the value perspective (uniqueness, value, importance). The list has always been implicitly a list of things journal publishers do, so this year I’ve made that explicit in the headline. “

…the U.S. Copyright Office released its long-awaited review of improvements to Section 108 of the Copyright Act, the section which grants limited, specific exceptions to copyright for libraries and archives. Over a decade ago the Office convened the Section 108 Study Group* to assess improvements to this section, and in 2008 that group produced its report. Since then (and with recent inquiries from the Office to stakeholders) we’ve been waiting to hear from the Copyright Office about its views on updates to Section 108. This Section 108 “Discussion Document” does just that.